The labour crisis could last for up to two years, Britain’s leading business lobby group has warned, as it called for ministers to take action on visas for foreign workers and stop “waiting for shortages to solve themselves”.
Amid the most severe labour crunch since the 1970s, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) launched a broadside against the government, saying the UK’s economic recovery from the winter lockdown was being undermined by a lack of skills in key positions, with mounting risks that the problem would continue for some time.
“Standing firm and waiting for shortages to solve themselves is not the way to run an economy,” said the CBI director general, Tony Danker, whose group represents 190,000 businesses with more than 7 million employees. “We need to simultaneously address short-term economic needs and long-term economic reform.”
He said the government’s ambition to make the British labour force more highly skilled and productive was right, and that businesses would train and hire more homegrown workers in time, but added that this could not be achieved overnight.
“A refusal to deploy temporary and targeted interventions to enable economic recovery is self-defeating,” said Danker.
The CBI is calling for the government’s shortage occupation list, which helps recruit workers from abroad to fill particular skills gaps, to be updated to include lorry drivers, welders, butchers and bricklayers.
A lack of butchers in slaughterhouses has caused a crisis on pig farms, with the National Pig Association warning that farmers may have to kill and burn nearly 100,000 animals unless ministers agree to a temporary relaxation of visa rules so that additional workers can be recruited to process the meat.
Britain needs about 100,000 more lorry drivers, according to the Road Haulage Association, which estimates it will take at least 18 months to train enough people to fill the gaps.
